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April 18, 2018 by Larry Davidson, PhD

Crisis Now: Transforming Services is Within Our Reach

The following is a report from the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Crisis Services Task Force from 2016, which focuses on transforming crisis response services to include recognition and response to trauma, a robust role for peer support, and a reorientation to recovery. This report, which we currently are finding very valuable in our on-going system transformation efforts in Connecticut, is a testament to the fact that even acute services, and even those services addressing persons in extreme distress, can be made strength-based, person-centered, culturally responsive (in including natural and community supports), and recovery-oriented.

Yale Symposium April 24, 2015

On April 24th, the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care is sponsoring an all-day symposium at Yale University entitled “New Data and New Hopes Call for New Practices in Clinical Psychiatry.” The symposium is co-sponsored by the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services for the State of Connecticut. Speakers include scientific advisors and board members of the Foundation, Yale Psychiatry faculty, and leading researchers and thought leaders from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and several other American universities.

Turning Lived Experience into Lived Expertise

The International Leadership Academy Fund has been established at the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care. It aims to prepare persons with lived experiences of mental ill health and recovery to take on leadership roles within their own local, regional, and national systems of care across the globe. The idea for this fund, and the program it seeks to develop, emerged from a meeting of prominent system leaders and advocates with lived experience who came together at Yale University in May of 2014. The meeting was sponsored by the International Institute for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL), directed by Foundation Chair Fran Silvestri, and was held to invite input from leaders with lived experience as to how the work of the IIMHL could benefit from the wisdom they and others had accrued through their own personal experiences of recovery and mental health system transformation efforts. The meeting was co-chaired by Larry Davidson, a professor of psychology at Yale and member of the Foundation Board, and Anthony Stratford of MIND Australia, and included lived experience leaders from Scotland, England, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the U.S.